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My Lai massacre, 1968. Ronald B.Haeberle/Wikicommons. Public domain.In the wake of the much-redacted partial Senate report on
CIA torture of Muslim prisoners in secret prisons across the world no American
is, yet, facing trial, as international law against torture demands.

Two CIA secret sites inside Guantanamo – codenamed Maroon
and Indigo – were identified in the Senate report, but did not get the
attention they deserve. That could change. A new book charges that CIA
operatives murdered three prisoners in a secret camp inside Guantanamo on the
night of June 9 2006. It describes too how the camp hierarchy and the official Naval
Criminal Investigation Service orchestrated a cover-up of the crimes by
reporting the deaths as suicides inside the mens’ own cells. This information should
be the basis of trials for murder and perversion of the course of justice.

Joseph Hickman, now 50, was a marine and then a soldier in
the army and the National Guard, a veteran of US foreign wars, a prison guard,
and the recipient of more than 20 awards and commendations. Ronald Reagan is
his favourite US president and he describes himself as a conservative. As a Staff
Sergeant at Guantanamo Bay he was with a Military Intelligence battalion. He
was the first soldier to fire on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. But, with a
chance offer to cover the night shift as Sergeant of the Guard for a friend
with a severe migraine on June 9 2006, Hickman was transformed into the most
significant whistleblower on Guantanamo in the 13 years of its war on
terror history. He is now an Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at a
prestigious law school.

Murder at Camp Delta,
published on January 20 by Simon and Schuster in the US, goes far beyond what Hickman
and other soldiers saw that night as the guards in charge of observing all
exits and entrances of Camp 1 and the rest of Camp America. It describes too
the research done independently by Seton Hall University Law School into the
official NCIS report.

The university team discovered that every page of the report
had been carefully vetted, redacted, and released with erratic page numbering making
it almost impossible to follow. There were major contradictions of witnesses –
including whether one victim was actually still alive when he arrived at the
medical faculty or whether all three had total rigor mortis. Another stunning finding was a two line statement
from an unidentified CID officer that “the page or pages from 9 june 2006 were
not available for me to examine. The page or pages pertaining to 9 june are
missing from the log book.”

Professor Mark Denbeaux, who heads the law school Guantanamo
programme, has for years led the field in research into Guantanamo using careful
examination of US government documents to explode one official narrative after
another. When Hickman initially phoned him the professor simply did not believe
the story of what the staff sergeant said he had seen, which pointed to three
murders by the CIA and a mammoth cover up – it was just too big. But after
speaking independently to a number of other guards on duty that night who all
confirmed that no one could have died in their cells in Alpha block without
being seen, and that no one was taken from the cell block to the medical
facility, Denbeaux knew it was the worst Guantanamo story of all that he and
his researchers had seen.

The deaths of Yasser Al Zahrani, Salah Ahmed Al Salami, and
Mani Shaman Al Utaybi were never accepted as suicides by their families, two in
Saudi Arabia and one in Yemen, or by former prisoners who knew them, especially
as autopsies showed the men’s necks had been removed. But the official narrative
prevailed. It was “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us,” Rear Admiral
Harry B Harris Jr, the commander of the camp, told a press conference about the
deaths. He described a “mystical belief” at Guantanamo that three men had to
die at the camp for all of the prisoners to be released.

Harris went on to be a Vice-Admiral in command of the Sixth
Fleet and his story to the journalists that the guards had found first one and
then the two other men hanging in their cells and been unable to save them, was
essentially the story in the NCIS report two years later, largely accepted.

The journalists listening to Harris in 2009 did not know
that the men were the camp’s last three hunger strikers, nor that they had been
brought to the medical facility with rags stuffed down their throats. But the
soldiers on duty in Camp 1 or on general watch all knew that, because they had
been told by Colonel Bumgarner, the most senior officer in the area that night.
But they had also been told by him in a special early meeting in the camp cinema,
that they would hear “a different story in the media.”

Hickman writes that the 75 soldiers there were given a
direct order not to talk about the night. “It might sound strange ordering us
to not even discuss the matter with people in the military. But to us, secrecy
was routine. … It was called 'op sec' or 'operational security'.” Hickman waited
for the Colonel to ask him for his statement, wondering if “they’d make me
report that my men saw the three guys carried out of Alpha block. I couldn’t
imagine implicating my guys in a crime like that.” But he was never asked for
his report either then, or for the NCIS team.

A Seton Hall report in 2009 based on analysis of the NCIS
report, and two major articles by the veteran writer Scott Horton in Harpers
Magazine, all exposed extremely serious flaws of logic in the official version and
some cited testimony from Hickman. Meanwhile, after three years of work in
seven countries the Norwegian journalist Erling Borgen produced (with the aid
of his father, Colonel Talal Al Zahrani,) a heart-breaking film on Yasser, a 17
year old when he was taken to Guantanamo in 2002 after being sold to the
Americans by Afghan bounty hunters.

Hickman had by chance earlier found Camp No – a secret part
of Guantanamo that did not officially exist. He had watched from the guard
tower on that June night as an unmarked white van, which all soldiers had been
told never to log and which they believed belonged to the CIA, made three
journeys with a prisoner from Camp Alpha to a road which led only to camp No,
and a few hours later returned to the medical facility where a major alert was
called. Three prisoners were dead. How could all this, followed by an official
story of hanging that defied all logic, be virtually ignored in the mainstream?

Hickman’s research into Guantanamo after he had left the
military “in pursuit of the truth about Guantanamo Bay,” as his book is
subtitled, led him to another prisoner now in the mainstream at last – British
resident Shaker Aamer long since cleared. An affidavit given to lawyer Zachary
Katznelson told how the same day Aamer too was taken to an unknown location, beaten
for two and a half hours, held in a restraint chair, had his airways cut off
when he screamed and then had a mask put on him.

Hickman’s book reveals a pattern of secret experimentation in
Guantanamo, with prisoners held to practice new ways of torture. (One example
was the use of extremely heavy doses for prisoners of the anti-malarial drug
Mefloquine, which can cause psychotic effects. No military personnel were given
anti-malarial medicine.) The chain of command for all this involved the White
House, Rumsfeld, the Generals heading military intelligence – a conspiracy too
big to be challenged.

This is déja vu
for anyone familiar with the 1970s in the US. In 1975/6 Senator Frank Church
headed the Senate committee on covert intelligence operations such as the
attempted assassinations of foreign leaders. The hearings followed a long New
York Times article by Seymour Hersh detailing many CIA and FBI operations,
including collecting information on the political activities of US citizens. One
of the members of the Ford administration who worked hardest to protect the CIA
in the hearings was Donald Rumsfeld.

Senator Church said once, speaking about the government’s
new technical ability to monitor its citizens: “I know the capacity is there to
make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all
agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper
supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from
which there is no return.” Young Americans like Edward Snowden and Chelsea
Manning are paying the price Church feared.

Before Frank Church there was Ron Ridenhour, the young
Vietnam veteran who tried to stir Congress and the Pentagon to look into the
Mylai massacre – one of the US army’s blackest episodes in Vietnam. I
interviewed him in Washington on a park bench as he sought any allies, and I
remember how what he recounted seemed just too big and too evil to be possible.
Against all the odds Ridenhour got his story out, as Hickman has done.
Ridenhour became a famous journalist, with an annual prize for bravery awarded
in his name after his early death at 52. I hope Hickman gets it this year.

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